Electronic energy meters have been developed for measuring the consumption of electrical energy on power lines. One architecture utilizes a digital signal processor for calculating various electrical parameters based on measured values of voltage and current, and a microcontroller for controlling the storage, display and communication of the electrical parameters calculated by the digital signal processor.
In this architecture, the phase voltages are scaled down to lower voltages using potential dividers, and the line currents are supplied to the primary windings of current transformers. The secondary windings of the current transformers provide current outputs proportional to a turns ratio between the secondary and primary windings of the transformer. A resistor with a very low temperature coefficient connected to the secondary winding of the current transformer provides a potential proportional to the value of the resistance and the current in the secondary winding. These signal conditioned voltage and current signals are supplied to an analog-to-digital converter and are digitized at periodic intervals. The digitized signals are supplied to the digital signal processor to compute instantaneous power and are integrated for a finite number of power line cycles to compute energy.
As inductive elements, the current transformers exhibit a phase lag between the primary and secondary windings. The phase lag may be different for different phases of the power line due to differences between individual current transformers and may be a nonlinear function of line current. Because certain measurements by the electronic energy meter are a function of the phase difference between current and voltage, measurement errors are produced. The errors due to the phase lag therefore adversely affect the accuracy of the electronic energy meter.
Power meter manufacturers typically implement conventional phase shifters using variable resistors and/or variable capacitors for each of the three phases of the power line. This approach increases material and production costs. Techniques have been developed that use two analog-to-digital converters and shift the sampling time of one of the converters with respect to the other. This approach requires additional circuitry and increases the cost of the hardware. These techniques do not compensate for the nonlinearity of the phase shift as a function of current that is exhibited by the current transformers. Prior art phase compensation techniques have been disclosed, for example, in U.S. Pat. No. 5,017,860 issued May 21, 1991 to Germer et al. and U.S. Pat. No. 5,231,347 issued Jul. 27, 1993 to Voisine et al.
Accordingly, there is a need for improved methods and apparatus for phase compensation in electronic energy meters.